An e-mail came into feedme2 the other day which shook me to the very core. It was from someone called Lucy London, whose name suggests that she is a porn star, but whose subject matter suggests that she is a rural English teacher. Perhaps she is both. The country is changing fast.

“Hi Giles,” she writes (rather informal for an English teacher, rather bland for a filth queen), “having spent a sleepless night [oo-er] agonising over this, I have reached the conclusion that it must have been a deliberate error designed to make sure all your adoring fans are taking note of your spoken word, as well as your written word.”

Hmm, the woman must have been watching some of the low-rent, minor-channel food broadcasting on which I occasionally appear, perhaps to distract her from the tedium of homework-marking.

“I must admit that there are others who mispronounce this word,” she goes on, “people who ought to know better, such as Sir Terry Wogan, Anne Robinson, Stephen Fry and Jeremy Paxman. The word is ‘culinary’, and should be pronounced ‘queue-linary’ because it comes from the Latin for ‘kitchen’. It does not start with ‘cull’. I feel sure you will put the nation right in a future programme (or indeed a future column).”

“Will I, buggery!” I said aloud (meaning it merely as a very old-fashioned and non-sexual English expletive, and then thinking that it was not the sort of thing I would say within earshot of Lucy London), for I will not be corrected on pronunciation. I pronounce everything correctly at all times (always, for example, pronouncing “flaccid”, “flak-sid”, as one should, and not “flassid” as almost everyone does) and simply could not be wrong on this. It is so obviously pronounced “cullinry”. How could it not be? I have never even heard anyone say “kyoo-linnery”. And if I did, I would poke them in the eye for overbearing prissiness.

I went to check that I was right (just to be certain) in the only source that matters, the Oxford English Dictionary:

…cubiculous, cubizite (see “cubicite”), cucking-stool, cuckoldage, cucumiform (“of the shape or form of a cucumber” – as so many things in Lucy London’s life no doubt are), Culbertson, culbut, culch, cunni- no, I’ve gone too far (in so many ways), back a bit, here: “culinary – of or pertaining to a kitchen”, the pronunciation given as… “kiu·linari”.

Nooooooooooo! It’s true. All these years I, we, have been wrong. Lucy London is right. But it’s horrible. I shall never say the word again. Which is a problem because synonyms are something of which the kyoolinary lexicon is woefully short. “Restaurant”, for example, simply doesn’t have one, and I won’t be caught using words like “eatery”, or “resto” or “rezzy”. Luckily, this week’s restaurant is not a restaurant at all, but an osteria. And so the problem of repetition is not quite as pressing.

The opening of Osteria Emilia has been long-awaited by the inhabitants of Lower Hampstead ever since its imminent arrival was announced by Giacobazzi’s, the incomparable Italian deli on Fleet Road opposite which it has been built, and with whom it shares its owner. The deli is great, we reasoned (I am an honorary resident by dint of living only several hours’ walk away across Hampstead Heath), and since Italian kyookery, sorry, cookery, is at its best little more than the heating up of good things, the resto (ugh, kill me) would be great too.

If there was a downside, it was that Osteria Emilia was to be built on the site of what was once Zamoyski, a long-standing Polish “restaurant” from the days when the idea of a person or a thing being Polish seemed impossibly exotic and unlikely. For £4.95 you got a seven-course meal of staggering grimness, and the opportunity to buy any (more often all) of 40 different vodkas. Burnt bigos and unspecified pickled things from the far and benighted end of the food chain came in sequence, each with the chance to order a new vodka (bison grass, pepper, plum, weasel, traffic light), and acted (if you could get them down) as little more than sandbags to absorb the worst ravages of the alcohol.

It was a dark, red-lit, cramped and hugger-mugger sort of place in which there simply wasn’t such a thing as a table-not-too-near-the-balalaika-trio, but it was such a unique experience that one couldn’t help going quite regularly. In my case, once every 12 years.

And now it has gone, and been replaced by two floors of pared-down, clean, white, very 21st century local (yuk) rezzy. There are now big windows letting in lots of natural light, and a proper staircase, and nice-looking staff you can actually see. And no live music.

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